reply to post by AzureSky
No convincing someone who has never seen one, heard on, or felt one.
How can you verify all stories are fake? do you know them all personally?
Seeing, hearing and feeling are all senses. It is generally true that we can trust our senses but there are many areas where they fail. I've had
so-called paranormal experiences, most of them took place when I was a child. As I grew up my understanding of the world became greater and I realized
that my senses could be fooled. After that I never had any paranormal experiences, even though I was interested into the paranormal to the point of
going on investigations, getting together with friends at 2 in the morning to visit cemeteries, etc.
As I came up empty handed almost every time I began to realize that each experience I'd had was not definitively paranormal. What I'd seen, heard and
felt was not evidence of ghosts or the supernatural, it was inexplicable to me at the time. Many of the events had alternative explanations and I
realized that even when I lacked a logical explanation jumping to a supernatural one only lessened my understanding of what really happened by
answering WITHOUT actually explaining.
The attitude that we need to 'confirm they are fake' will get us nowhere fast, and is backwards to how science and truth-seeking in general should be
done. The burden of proof is on those who claim encounters happened and on those who claim ghosts are real. The skeptic, the disbeliever, holds no
burden of proof and thus no responsibility to 'verify' that a story is fake. Any story about the supernatural should be held false until it can be
verified with positive evidence. Extraordinary claims, such as claims about ghosts, require extraordinary evidence and ANYONE is entirely JUSTIFIED in
disbelieving simply in lieu of the lack of solid evidence in FAVOR of ghosts.
They exist whether you want to believe it or not, out of the multiple thousands if not millions of encounters around the world, chances are that a
minority of them are fake.
This is another attitude that gets us nowhere. Asserting without evidence that ghosts exist, or is your evidence for their existence merely the
prevalence of sightings and experiences? But then can't we use the same thing to prove Bigfoot, the Virgin Mary, elves, fairies, vampires and all
sorts of other folklore? There is no reason to take claims of ghosts appearing before people more seriously than we take claims of people taken aboard
UFOs and shown their alien baby, or people who see visions of this-or-that religious figure. Eye-witness testimony may be acceptable in
court-scenarios but in science it is the weakest form of observational evidence imaginable and as I already stated evidence for something like ghosts
would have to be extraordinary to meet the burden of proof. Saying, "millions of encounters", have taken place is hardly extraordinary evidence.
So I'm someone who's both heard and felt what I believed at the time to be ghosts telling you that what you see, what you feel and what you hear are
not always the best ways to determine what is actually real. Your senses can be fooled and you should wait to see concrete evidence before accepting
incredible claims, especially if you want something to be real/true.
reply to post by Alyssa
I have yet to see any evidence for ghosts, likely because there is no good evidence for them. From my own personal experiences, and those encounters
I've heard and read about, I'd say that most genuine reports of ghostly encounters are hallucinations or explainable events that simply defy the
explanation of the one experiencing them at the time. As an example when I was a kid I can recall playing with my toys and hearing a horrifying
growling and grating coming from my room. I bolted out of there and had trouble sleeping in there for a while. I heard the noise again soon after
that. Months later I discovered that one of my toys had a dying battery and rather than play the sound of Godzilla's roar it now played a distorted
and very scary sound like what I imagined a demonic growl would sound like.
Many encounters have alternate explanations that are not immediately apparent to the person involved and also, I've found, that with time alleged
paranormal experiences become hazy in the memory either from re-telling them to others and using embellishment or just the fallibility of human memory
especially in regards to details.
edit on 21-6-2012 by Titen-Sxull because: (no reason given)